Become Part of the Community

When you join the Side Project Accelerator you join a mastermind group of side-project hackers that will help hold you accountable for getting your shit done!

Here are some examples of what went down in our community in the first batch:

People gave constructive design critique.

Members helped each other solve bugs and fix code.

They shared inspiring articles, helpful tools, and specific resources to get through the weekly assignment.

People shared real stats from email campaigns, A/B tests and other experiments with their audience.

In-person meetups with about half of the people in the batch. We travel a lot and if we always make an effort to host a meetup in any city that has SPA members. When we say community, we mean community!

A group of SPA members grabbing a beer in Tel Aviv

1 on 1 calls with us!

As a members of the Side Project Accelerator you will get exclusive 1 on 1 skype sessions with us (David & Sagi) where we will answer any question you might have and help you with any topic related to your side project! We also have weekly “office hours” where we answer questions in the community Slack group.

We are here to accompany you along your journey, and we know this is a long term thing, so we’re here for you in the long term to make sure you succeed!

When you’re part of the SPA community, you get our top most priority to be there for you and help you succeed.

Access to our own tools & apps

As a members of the Side Project Accelerator you will get access to the tools that we use and develop on a regular basis. At this point this involves access to the following:

Thought Leaders – A web app that curates content for you based on your favorite authors and topics.

Chrome Extension – An extension that we built, which scrapes and sends a web page’s details to your Google Spreadsheet

Google Apps Script – This is the real gem in our workflow. It’s a spreadsheet that will hold the links that you found on ThoughtLeaders and sent via the extension. The spreadsheet has our script attached to it, which takes the rows of links and creates HTML, which you can simply copy and paste into any email marketing service you choose.

Our newsletter template – Our template is something we continuously tweak to enhance readability and clarity (hence upping its open rate and click rate metrics), while keeping the brand awerness at its core. This template may not work for you or for the niche your are trying to target, but it’s a great starting point to get you to start sending FAST!

What our members have to say

And we are?

After working on our side project for the past two and a half years, we were able to quit our jobs and do it full time. Now it’s your turn, and we want to help you get there.

David Tintner

David is the development half of Hacking UI. He’s a full stack developer, who’s worked on projects (both in his day job and on the side) in every language from JavaScript to C#.

He’s an entrepreneur at heart and is always thinking up the next business idea. In 2012 he co-founded a competitive intelligence company called TapDog. TapDog was acquired by SimilarWeb, where he worked as a senior developer and team leader for the last two and half years.

He now lives in Tel Aviv, Israel and is an avid reader, traveler and music lover. If he’s not at his desk hacking away on the next side project, you can probably find him at some Burning Man festival.

Sagi Shrieber

Sagi is the design half of Hacking UI. He’s been in the industry for longer than he’d like to remember, working with large companies such as Fiverr and Ebay. He was a co-founder of TagDog, and when it was acquired he became the Head of Product Design at SimilarWeb, and has scaled the design team there from 0 to 6 designers.

Known in many circles as the originator of the side project, Sagi had his first taste of side project success in 2011 when he launched Pixel Perfect Magazine, the largest Israeli design blog and community to this day.

Today he is also a mentor at Google Campus in Tel Aviv, working with startups to improve their UX. He lives in Herzliya, Israel with his wife, two kids and dog. When he’s not up to his eyeballs in Sketch layers or writing about the next big productivity hack, he’s probably practicing Shaolin Kung Fu.

Our Side Projects & Full-time Jobs

We met in the summer of 2012 when we joined as co-founders of a startup called Moolta. Back then Sagi had an Israeli design blog, Pixel Perfect Magazine. We joined the UpWest Labs accelerator program with our startup and moved to Silicon Valley. We eventually did a major pivot and renamed our startup TapDog.

In early 2014 Tapdog was acquired by SimilarWeb, where we both worked for two and a half years in leadership roles. But just before we started to work at SimilarWeb we decided to launch Hacking UI.

We began with nothing, but quickly started growing an audience and monetizing. We continued to scale Hacking UI in terms of audience and income to the point that we were able to quit our jobs and work on it full time.

Success doesn’t happen overnight!

This is NOT a get rich quick course. This will also not even promise you’d make enough money to leave your day job. You’ll have to put in the work to be able to see the benefits over time, and the benefits might not even be in the form of money at first. You should be totally OK with that. You will, however, experience impacting people pretty fast if you follow the course and its assignments. After the course you’ll get lifetime support with us and the community, to make your side project a success!

More on the 8 Video Lessons & Assignments

For each of the first 8 weeks you’ll get a new video lesson and work through these lessons at the same time as the rest of the members of the batch, sharing experiences, experiment results and promotion opportunities. All lessons are available in both video and podcast format, so you can consume them at your own convenience and optimize your time.

In these lessons you’ll learn our ENTIRE methodology, the same methodology that we used to build and scale Hacking UI and allow us to quit our jobs.

We’ll share with you:

Real financial figures! How much we made, how much we charged, and how much we spent. No holding back.

Templates we use to get sponsorships, podcast guests, and promotional help from thought leaders.

Actual products that we built for our own internal use to help us be more productive.

Techniques that we developed, tested and improved over more than 5 years to build an organic audience.

Sounds good so far? Check out the entire syllabus to see the content of each lesson.

A side project costs money. Aside from the tuition for the program, you will need to pay for things like hosting, MailChimp, outsourcing costs, virtual assistants, podcasting equipment, etc. Yes, it is possible to completely bootstrap and build everything yourself. But if you are going to reinvent the wheel instead of investing a few dollars on industry-standard resources, then you won’t be able to get the most out of this program.

If you don’t feel like this program is for you after the first lesson, we’ll give you a 100% refund

Registration for the 3rd batch will open soon

Waiting ListSide Projects

Get notified when registration opens

In the meanwhile – get started with CurationKit

We took our tools, wrapped them inside a nice package with a great course to jumpstart a curated links newsletter, and made them available for purchase at a low price. Now on pre-sale!

Have any questions?

We would love to be in touch! shoot an email over to [email protected] or [email protected] (or both). We’d be happy to discuss your side project with you further and see if this program is right for you.